


Ice

by renquise



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 13:08:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1120183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." (Cherry-Garrard, 1922)</p><p>(Or, a snippet of an AU where Erwin and Levi are polar explorers at the turn of the century.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice

The air was cold enough to burn Erwin’s throat, crisp and hard as a knife-edge even inside the shelter. There was the pressure of Hanji’s body at his back, rising and falling with her breathing, and a lump that he thought might be a penguin egg. She could be sleeping, but he was not sure—the best he had been able to manage had been a fitful half-doze, and it was his own shivering that jerked him awake, more often than not.

When Levi crawled into the shelter, he closed it as best he could, making sure to leave a hole for breathing, and then collapsed against Erwin’s chest and curled into himself.

“’S too damn cold to piss anything but icicles,” he muttered into Erwin’s coat. “Your fingers?”

Erwin flexed his fingers inside his mitts; they were painful, yes, but there was little that they could do about that for the moment. “Fine,” he said. He estimated a few hours since the storm had separated them from the rest of the expedition, Mike’s shouts inaudible over the bitter wind and snow; the loss of a few digits was entirely possible, depending on the length of the storm, but he had considered the possibility before.

When Erwin had spoken to potential sponsors over cigars and brandy in the aftermath of a fine dinner, he had spoken of the glory of empire and the necessity of planting a flag in the furthest inhospitable reaches of the earth. Levi had unquestionably been an asset to these conversations, his shoes up on the sitting room table, incongruous and lovely in evening dress as he wordlessly dismissed these fine ideals--no doubt providing a thrill to the young lords and dukes eager for secondhand glory and adventure. And so Erwin talked to them of glory, and not of the blackened tips of frostbitten fingers and the slow death of the body, or the mundane necessities of a ship capable of enduring crushing pressure, and sled dogs, and nutrition, and all necessary to pit men against the deadly monotony of ice.

Hanji had caused a stir in his backers, as was to be expected from the daughter of a mill-owner who had cheerfully bullied her way into the Royal Geographical Society and donned masculine attire whenever possible, and seemed to have every intention of becoming a spinster with multiple publications as her progeny. She had simply sent a letter to Erwin introducing herself as a sporty girl who had detailed experimental objectives for studying the fauna of the Antarctic, heartily implacable in her determination. And with that, Erwin had the core of his crew: a criminal and a woman who had no business calling herself a scientist, both led by a fourth son with strange ambitions, according to the newspapers.

It was an able crew, all willing to brave the extremes of the elements and experienced in survival. Erwin had done the grim calculus of the bodies that would be left in the ice, had considered what might be left behind.

Levi had come to his cabin when they had drifted across the sixtieth parallel, the winds bitter in the sails and the waves menacing and inhuman against the sides of the ship. He had leaned onto the maps on Erwin’s desk, swaying easily with the tilt of the ship, placed his rough, fine-boned hand over the pole, and asked him how far he was willing to go.

The answer must have satisfied him; Levi had inclined his head, and then placed his cold hand on Erwin’s neck, curling his fingers in to warm them against his skin. He had no fucking use for glory (that, Erwin had known), but he had a lot of fucking use for survival, he said. He was all sharp angles and hard planes in Erwin’s lap, not dissimilar to the sheets of ice rising out of the sea, clear and blue where the sun shone through. They would not see the sun for a long time in the months when they would weather the winter on the continent, and so Erwin had gathered Levi closer.

This was merely the first attempt, mostly intended to set the supply caches, and so they would turn back to the base in the morning, when the storm would recede into the irregular, dangerous edge of the horizon, and trust that the other parts of the expedition would return as well.

Levi was right in this regard; an expedition such as this was not a matter of conquest, but of persistence.

Inside the shelter, the wind was muffled, and their breathing seemed far louder, his own slow breath indistinguishable from that of Hanji or Levi’s: enough, for now, until the morning came.


End file.
